Friday, June 20, 2008

More Busy-ness

Form the get-go yesterday I was in a rush to get things done. Toby had planned a big cookout for his office people and summer interns at Halliburton. He planned on fajitas and volleyball – sounds like a Baggett party for sure. Forty-one people showed up. It was a good time with the weather around 89. But it made for a busy day preparing food and having art class. I made the pico de gallo using about 18 tomatoes. I cut and de-seeded about 20 jalapenos and stuffed them with cream cheese for grilling. While slicing and dicing, I also held art class – one hot mama. Around 5 PM I chased the art girls off so that I could head to town with my food. We ate and played V-ball until about 8 PM. I slept very well last night. This morning I hit the ground running again to get us ready for our trip to Lubbock.

Here is my artwork from yesterday – still in progress. I did not crop the photo so that I could show you a bit of the progress. Normally I do not tape my paper down, but when I plan on really wetting the paper, it is kind of good to stretch the paper. To get the soft color flow, the paper has to be wet. My old art teacher called this style of watercolor "the art of finding the lost line." Once you drop color in, you go back and find shapes (leaves or whatever) and do a bit of reverse painting to bring out those shapes and lines. I love this style of watercolor. To me, it is a true watercolor painting – not just straight painting.

I was reading my "Cowboys and Indians" magazine with an article on the top cowboy songs (in their opinion), but one of the songs listed was "In the Real West" by my ex-sister-in-law, Tish Hinojosa. If you want to hear the song, you will have to google it. You know how I am with videos. Tish is certainly talented, not to mention giving me a wonderful niece and nephew who are also very talented.

I received a phone call this morning from the Piper. I will let him trumpet his news, but know that all is well with the Royals…and their new prince.

Reverse painting is painting the back ground to leave the shape of an object. In other words the background color defines the shapes. After I dropped in color onto wet paper, it was just a mass of wild color. Rather than painting little circles for the grapes or painting leaves, I painted around them.